Upcoming
28 May 2015
The Villa Romana 2016 Fellows have been announced
Flaka Haliti, Stefan Vogel, Nico Joana Weber and Jonas Weichsel are the Villa Romana Prize winners of 2016.
This year’s jury – the artist Katharina Grosse and Bettina Steinbrügge, Director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg – selected four artists from thirteen nominations.
Flaka Haliti, born in 1982 in Pristina, studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and is currently studying for her PhD in Vienna. She lives between Munich and Prishtina, and is at the Venice Biennale in this year’s Kosovo Pavilion with a solo exhibition. In her critical, poetic and intimate artwork, she highlights migration experiences between cultures and social systems as well as the construction of boundaries and marginalisation. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions since 2005, including in mumok, Vienna (2014), the National Gallery Kosovo, Prishtina (2014), the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt (2013), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2012) and in the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (2012).
Stefan Vogel, born in 1981 in Fürth, studied at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst Hamburg until 2012 and now lives in Berlin. In his paintings, collages and installations, Vogel seeks the soundless collision of representation and worthlessness, minimalism and emotion, oil painting and mould, abstraction and the quotidien. Stefan Vogel has exhibited in galeries and project spaces since 2006, including: Balzer Art Projects, Basel (2015), Phönixhallen, Hamburg Harburg (2014), Feinkunst Krüger, Hamburg (2012), Texas Firehouse, Long Island City, New York (2010), Galerie Dzyga, Lemberg, Ukraine and Golden Pudel Club Hamburg (both 2009).
Nico Joana Weber, born in 1983 in Bonn, studied at Goldsmiths College in London and completed postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In her films and complex video installations, she examines modernist architectures, subjective inspections and uses, and processes of social transformation. In doing so, she refers, among other things, to Le Corbusier’s concept of a “promenade architecturale”, conceiving of architecture through observation and movement. In addition to her degree, Nico Joana Weber was also curatorial assistent at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, received a scholarship in 2012 for the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and exhibited her work at the VIDEONALE 14 in Bonn and at Art Cologne.
Jonas Weichsel, born in 1982 in Darmstadt, lives in Frankfurt, where he studied at the Städelschule. In 2012 he was awarded the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship and since then has been represented by the Galerie Parisa Kind. In 2015 his paintings were displayed in the Kunsthalle Mainz and in both the Frankfurt Kunstverein and the Wiesbaden Kunstverein, and before that in the Kunstverein Heidelberg and in the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt (both 2010), as well as elsewhere. In his abstract-formal painting, he confronts digitally generated pictorial space concepts with paint-specific techniques, such as interference colours, the iridescent colours of which are not digitally (re)producible. Perfection and abstraction interplaying with the concretion of material generate subtle and complex shifts of perception.
